LETTER XXXVI.

From the Architect.

THE LESSON OF THE ICE-HOUSE.


MRS. JOHN: Dear Madam,--Without doubt the affair is getting serious,
but do not give yourself any uneasiness as to the issue. The Divinity
that shapes our matrimonial ends is, happily, a wiser power than that
which designs our houses, however it may appear to outsiders. Your
friend talks like a gentleman and a scholar. I admonished him
discreetly, promised to study his interesting problem and give him a
chapter on ventilation; which, by the way, is so intimately connected
with warming, that I may be obliged to make a sort of company letter
in answering your husband's inquiry on that subject. Tell him, in
brief, to use fireplaces if he has a hundred acres of wood-land to
clear up; stoves, if he can live without air; grates, if he doesn't
mind the trouble and the ashes; furnace, if he can set it directly
under each room and can find one that won't strangle him some windy
night with poison gases; and steam or hot water, if he can run a
machine-shop and keep a competent engineer. Solar heat may be more
available than he thinks, but his doubt as to the last-named mode
proves that he has no experimental knowledge of it. Neither have I.

Tell him also to protect his family as carefully as he protects his
ice, and the house-warming will be a simple matter. The conditions are
identical, only turned inside out. In one case the heat is to be kept
from penetrating, in the other from escaping, and both require the